KFC fans are distraught over the changes the fast-food chicken joint is making to increase its bottom line. The fast food chain restaurant will be removing popular menu items like popcorn chicken and wings along with other items, including Nashville Hot sauce, strawberry lemonade, and chocolate chip cookies. While a lot of things are going to be changing at a KFC restaurant near you, especially when it comes to the offerings on their menu, KFC’s original Colonel Sanders recipe with eleven herbs and spices will remain as it is.

KFC is owned by YUM! Brands. The company made the announcement that their “menu simplification” will be going into effect very soon because the restaurant chain wants to increase their workers’ efficiency and make it easier for customers to place their orders by reducing the number of options available to them.

One additional reason KFC will be slimming down its menus is to allow for the fast-food restaurant to focus on innovative solutions that could be appetizing to the American consumer marketplace.

“It’s really to deliver our most popular products perfectly each time and to actually make room for new products.” KFC U.S. Director Brittany Wilson told Yahoo Finance.

The menu at your local KFC restaurant will likely be changing in the next month or so. The company is trying to get rid of its popular menu items in order to “make room for this big spring of innovation that KFC has coming.”

The items that were picked to get kicked off the menu were selected for a variety of reasons, including that they “weren’t available on a national scale or that [they] haven’t necessarily been growing on a national sales mix,” Wilson said.

And apparently, the menu changes are working for some franchise owners. One such person, Justin Stewart, a KFC franchise owner and COO of Stewart Restaurant Group, said that his employees already see the benefit. The workers have been able to cut down the time it takes employees to package up orders as well as improve the drive-thru rates.

“Our team members have been able to package orders more quickly due to having less items on our pack line. As a result, we’ve reduced our drive-through order time by 11 seconds.”

Data from Intouch Insight’s 2022 Annual Drive-Thru Study saw that the average KFC drive-thru customer has to wait about 63.6 seconds for their order. The total service time was roughly four minutes in length, or 239.02 seconds. And there were usually two cars in a line.

Stewart claimed that order accuracy has also improved by simplifying the menu.

“By removing less popular menu items, we’ve improved order accuracy and product availability overall and created space in the back of the house. We’ve also reduced our controllable costs because of less waste, less prep, and less cleanup time.”

Stewart claims that his customers have had a “positive” experience with the menu change because they are able “to navigate the new menu board more quickly and easily.”

What do you think about the KFC menu changes?